Impressions: Star Wars Force Unleashed II Demo on Xbox 360

Today the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II went live on XBL. To say that thissite is a little excited for the game is an understatement.

From almost the very beginning we’ve been covering it like crazy, in anticipation for the October 26th release. A lot of hype has gone into this game, and I’m sure sites like ours haven’t been helping, but I downloaded the demo and hoped for the best.

Immediately I was thrown into a conversation between Starkiller and Darth Vader. Starkiller is informed by Vader that General Kota has been kidnapped, and the two of them begin to discuss voices Starkiller has been hearing along with strange dreams. Vader assures him that they are memories of a dead man as he is a clone, and that he needs to ignore them otherwise Starkiller is of no use to Vader.

It is then that Starkiller hears the voice of Kota, warning him that he is only trying to manipulate him so that he pledges his allegiance to Vader, and then a fight begins between you and some robots that are cloaked to look like the enemy. One of them looks and sounds like Juno Eclipse, who is giving Starkiller a bit of shit.

During this staged rumble, you learn which buttons are used to perform Force Push, Force Lightning, and other moves. Once you finish with the little tutorial, you are shown a cutscene with Vader demanding that you kill the Juno lookalike. Unable to do so, Vader does it for you, and he tells you that the previous batches of clones were almost always insane from the get-go, yet he had high hopes for you.

Not wanting to be deemed defective in Vader’s eyes and have him potentially kill you, Starkiller escapes and that’s when you really begin to explore the demo and your abilities.

Graphically the game is stunning. The voice acting and facial movements for Starkiller are spot on, and I got a laugh at when the Troopers, who are trying to stop you, keep saying how they’re going to kill you. They are men in plastic-y armor with blasters. You have two lightsabers, a fuck load of Force, and are there to kick some ass. No contest!

I found the movements in the demo to be more fluid than in the original, and for some reason the way the controls were laid out seemed different. I also felt that Starkiller seemed to be much more powerful this time around, but that is in no way a complaint. I found myself chuckling a few times at all of the evil things I was able to do, like throwing TIE Fighters around or chopping the limbs and heads off of the Troopers.

Upon killing an enemy, they give off little green wisps that give you health, and there are large holocron blocks that can either give you experience (yellow), or a boost to the amount of Force you have (blueish purple). I’m not too sure if it will be different in the full game, or if it will be slightly changed for the four different difficulty levels they have: Easy, Normal, Hard, Unleashed. When I started the demo for the first time, Unleashed was locked, so I don’t know if, by beating the demo on hard, it will unlock it or not.

Even though the demo was around 20 minutes long, I could already tell that the storyline is going to be good, some of the combos you get will make the game much more than a button masher, and gamers are going to have a lot of fun with this.

The demo did what it was set out to do and that is getting gamers really excited for October 26th. Some pretty stiff competition comes out that day (Fable III, Rock Band 3, The Sims 3 for consoles, Tony Hawk: Shred), so it was wise of LucasArts to release the demo now and get that buzz going even more.

If you haven’t reserved a copy of the game, I highly suggest that you do, or if you use services like GameFly, definitely go and put it in your My Q now for whatever system you’d prefer it on. This game is going to seriously own.